How a small family business became a household name
While in Georgia a couple of months ago, I paid a visit to the Trulock Tool Company and found out they were about a lot more than just shotgun chokes.
As a choke is the last part of the barrel and is relied on to pattern the shot, precision is key to every aspect of its design and production.
George Trulock, the family paterfamilias and founder of the company, was a full-time police officer for the small Grady county town of Cairo– his birthplace– and part-time gunsmith who specialized in large-framed wheelguns, with special attention to big Smith & Wesson N frames. Having to craft his own tools to get the job done, he hit on the idea that other folks may have been having similar issues and started to manufacture specialized pistol smith tools such as frame wrenches and crane straighteners.
If you have an old copy of just about any gun magazine from the late 1970s and early 1980s, you can find his ads under the gunsmithing sections.
Soon, George pivoted from wheel guns to making his shotgun chokes of an innovative type that could be retrofitted into the common cylinder-bore shotgun barrels of the time, without the user having access to a machine shop to make it happen. With demand for these new Tru-Choke style choke tubes being heavy, to say the least, he took the plunge in 1982, hung up his badge, and started clocking in as Employee No. 1 at the newly formed Trulock Firearms, which later morphed into the company that continues his name today.
And, with Mr. George now passed, the company is still innovating, now in the hands of his sons, who are very much still in the “family business.”
More in my column at Guns.com.
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